The Darnton debate

Ever since Professor Robert Darnton aroused the interest of all Enlightenment scholars with the publication of `The High Enlightenment and the low-life of literature in prerevolutionary France' in 1971, he has been in the forefront of debate about that period. His work has long been an indispensable study for all those who ponder on the nature and evolution of this great movement. By the mid 1990s, however, it was apparent that Darnton's far-reaching conclusions on the relationship of the Enlightenment to the Revolution merited a comprehensive debate on his whole oeuvre.

The essays collected here, by a team of established Enlightenment scholars, take up a whole spectrum of positions about Darnton's work, based on deep reflection or assiduous source-research or both. In a coda to the volume Robert Darnton responds robustly to the various readings of his work. In places he seeks to rescue it from what he considers to be false interpretations and to set the record straight. But his essay also moves the debate on, bringing insights and information not previously published. His conclusions are flexibly open-ended, and in line with the courtesy that has always characterised his arguments, whatever the rigour with which they have been pursued. As he says, history has no bottom line ; even so, its depths have been richly plumbed in his writings.

Contributors : David S. Bell, Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, Daniel Gordon, Carla Hesse, Thomas E. Kaiser, D. F. McKenzie, Roland Mortier, François Moureau, Renato Pasta, Jeremy D. Popkin, Jonathan Rose, Dominique Varry.

With a concluding essay by Robert Darnton.